[wildfly-dev] WildFly Community Space Replacement

[Jaikiran Pai]

Hello James,

On 01/02/20 1:56 am, James Perkins wrote:
> Hello All,
> We are in a position where we need to change the community space for
> WildFly, currently located at https://developer.jboss.org/en/wildfly/.
> On 2020-03-1 this community space will become read-only.
>
> We've got 3 areas we need to move.
>
>  1. Forums/Q&A
>  2. Wiki/FAQ
>  3. Articles
>
>
> 1. Forums/Q&A
> My preference here is we would use Stack Overflow, specifically the
> wildfly tag <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wildfly>. It
> seems the forums is really more Q&A than anything.
>
> If we want to keep the forum and Q&A separate we could use Stack
> Overflow for the Q&A and Google Groups for the forum. Though I don't
> really see much difference between the forum and Q&A.

The JBoss AS (and now) WildFly forums have over the years seen a steady
decline in the number of posts and the quality of posts. Unfortunately,
even release announcements which used to happen in the forums previously
are no longer made there. Participation in terms of answers or helping
out with issues has reduced too (as compared to like maybe a decade
ago). The new forum software (Jive), IMO has contributed a lot towards
this - its editor was and still is a major hassle, plus the rules around
posting (from what I remember new users weren't allowed to post more
than a few posts within a few minutes of each other and had to wait
hours to post next). Plus, repeated complaints from regular users about
this, never ended up seeing any results. Regular contributors who used
to answer or help out on issues are no longer around.

Having said that, from what I see, WildFly forum as compared to other
forums still sees good amount of traffic in terms of questions. I think
JBoss AS and WildFly forums are probably the most active ones right
(they used to compete with RichFaces and to some extent HornetQ forum in
terms of traffic, but ever since they were sunset, the application
server forums are the more frequented ones).

I don't have any concerns on moving away from the current location of
these forums. However, I personally don't like them being moved to
StackOverflow. I have tried to be a user at StackOverflow a few times,
during the past decade. But every time, I have disliked it. If you look
at the JBoss AS/WildFly forums, you will notice that a lot of these
discussions/questions span multiple posts where the original poster and
the volunteer helpers go back and forth asking details and trying to
narrow down what the issue is - more like a debug session spread across
multiple posts. This kind of interactive discussion hasn't ever been
encouraged at StackOverflow and neither does the software nor the people
involved seem to encourage it there. That has always made me stay away
from StackOverflow.

Google groups on the other hand I think are a better place. I don't use
its web interface, but given that it integrates right into your email
client, I have found it gives the same level of interactive nature that
you typically want in discussions. Quarkus project has been using google
groups for its user + dev discussions and so far I have really liked it.
So I think maybe hosting the forums as a google group mailing list might
be a good idea. In fact, I have a feeling that it might bring in more
participation, both from the users as well as volunteers contributors
(but that's just a guess).

By the way, I don't fully understand the difference between Q&A and
forums. To me they sound the same and unless I'm missing something.
Asking users to post in 2 different places (one for Q&A and one for
forums) might not be a good idea.


>
> 2. Wiki/FAQ
> For this we could use GitHub Wiki here. For details
> see https://help.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/about-wikis.
>
I don't think anyone uses Wiki/FAQ anymore these days (I miss the days
where I used to wait for wikis from Scott Stark. The classloading one is
still one of my favourite ones). Neither have I seen too many new
wikis/FAQ being created nor have I seen them being referred to in the
forums (unlike the good old Adrian days ;)). So I don't have much of an
opinion on whether or not to have a new place for them.


> 3. Articles
> I don't know how often articles get created, but it doesn't look like
> often. My suggestion would be that we just use wildfly.org
> <http://wildfly.org> for this. These seem to be akin to blog posts. 
>
Articles these days have mainly been from the WildFly dev team
before/after a release about new features (which is a good thing). Again
I haven't liked the software that hosts these articles (again the editor
and other hassles around it), but at least there have been some new
articles every now and then. I think wilfly.org for articles sounds
fine. Maybe it should optionally have the ability to aggregate any good
community users' articles every now and then.

Having said all this, I think it's best to post this announcement and
ask for suggestions in the WildFly forums itself, since those are the
users we should be looking inputs from.

-Jaikiran

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